An international ice cricket tournament has been played on Lake St. Moritz since 1988 and now in Estonia every year since 2004. The inventor of the Estonian version is credited to Jason Barry, a British ex-pat and former Estonian cricket president who was determined to increase the visibility of Estonian cricket throughout the year.
The summer game of cricket is applied to some of the harshest, most wintry conditions. The difference between Ice Cricket and other forms of cricket played in the winter is that Ice Cricket is played directly on the ice, no mat is laid down. The results are a little more unpredictable and provide more fun and variety.
The ball is the same as an indoor cricket ball, a composite plastic red ball which makes it relatively easy to find if it gets hit into a snowdrift.
The Ice Cricket World Championship is held annually in the Estonian city of Tallinn. With winter temperatures of minus 10 to minus 25, the tournaments are played on Harku boating lake, which freezes over rapidly in early January.
Read more about Ice Cricket: Rules
Famous quotes containing the words ice and/or cricket:
“‘Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)